Home School Phonics
Home school phonics
Phonics is the skill of matching letters to voice sounds and matching voice sounds to letters. When we learn to read and write we develop this skill otherwise we wouldn t be able to read and write competently. Of course not all of us found this easy to learn &some of us found it profoundly difficult &and some have never managed to master it. Modern countries like the United States have literacy incompetence levels of around 30% among adults &frightening, isn t it?
The teaching of phonics has been found by researchers to allow children (and adults) develop their literacy skills much more quickly.
So, how does it work? Home school Phonics is where you, the teacher, teach/guide your child through learning, the 42 phonemes (voice sounds) of the english language and the 100 or so ways of spelling them. Now, if you were teaching reading and writing in the traditional way &by teaching whole word recognition &you would be doing this too. But, nowadays, when we use the term Phonics we are talking about teaching these sounds and spellings systematically. This means that the sounds and how to spell them are taught separately. In the traditional approach these sounds and spellings are not taught separately but are learned by hearing them and seeing them over and over again.
An excellent home school phonics resource will provide you with the systematic procedure you need and lots of resources to make the process fun! If it s not fun your child won t learn.
The recommended home school phonics resource is
Frontline Phonics
. This resource was rated by Weekly Reader as #1 program in the nation for teaching beginning readers and has a five star rating at About.com.
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